Traces the history of piracy from the Spanish Main, where Drake and the Elizabethan sea dogs plundered vast quantities of treasure from Spanish galleons returning to the Old World, to the China Seas where, in the early nineteenth century, the female pirate Ching Yih Saou commanded a fleet of over 800 junks. It examines the realities of pirate life through everyday items that would have been used by the pirates themselves--weapons, navigational instruments,...